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Konrad Adenauer
Konrad Adenauer (5 January 1876 – 19 April 1967) was the Chancellor of West Germany from 1949 to 1963, the first leader of postwar present-day Germany following World War II. He led his country to an economic recovery in Wirtschaftswunder, founded the Bundeswehr in 1955, and ended centuries of rivalry between Germany and France in the Elysee Treaty. Biography Konrad Adenauer was born on 5 January 1876 in Cologne, Rhenish Prussia, in the German Empire to a devout Roman Catholic family. He was influenced in his childhood by Kulturkampf waged by Otto von Bismarck against the other cultures of Germany, primarily Poland. In 1906 he joined the Center Party of Germany, and, from 1917 to 1933, he served as Mayor of Cologne. During World War I, he maximized the use of Cologne as a base of supply for the Reichswehr fighting against the American, British, and French forces in France. He aided the British while they occupied the city in the Interwar Years (1919-1938), and he was called a traitor by some because of his friendship with the French and his hopes for "true German" Rhenish independence from the Wends, Slavs, and Obotrites who founded Prussia. Adolf Hitler admired Adenauer while he was a politician in Nazi Germany, but his principles made it impossible for him to play any role for Nazi Germany. After World War II's end in 1945, the US Army installed him again as Mayor of Cologne, a city that was heavily-bombed during the war. On 26 June 1945 he founded the Christian Democratic Union, a conservative political party that united the traditional rivals of Roman Catholics and Protestants. Adenauer's political career was seen as Anglophobic, because of his speeches about the destruction of Cologne by the United Kingdom's RAF during World War II and his resistance to British dominance over Germany. In 1949, he was elected Chancellor of West Germany under President Theodor Heuss, and he was the head of government of West Germany. He made Bonn the capital of West Germany, and during his tenure, West Germany underwent economic recovery. The West allowed him to form the Bundeswehr armed forces in 1955, with the Western Allies agreeing that a Red Army invasion from the Soviet Union would result in anti-German genocide like what had happened before in 1944-45. In September 1951 he delivered a speech to the Bundestag and announced that Germany would have to compensate to Israel for the Holocaust, and from 1953 he decided to pay Israel money in return for the 6,000,000 Jews killed in the Holocaust. In 1951 he ended Denazification, benefitting 3,000 SA, SS, and Nazi personnel, 20,000 Nazis sentenced for murder, 30,000 Nazis sentenced for bodily injury, and 5,200 charged for crimes and misdemeanors in office. In 1953 he was re-elected as Chancellor after the people of Germany witnessed the the quelling of the People's Uprising in East Germany in Soviet-controlled East Germany, and in 1955 he began negotiations with the Soviet Union to release the last 10,000 Wehrmacht POWs from WWII. Although he broke off relations with Yugoslavia and other countries that allied with East Germany and refused to recognize East Germany's independence. He also clashed with Poland, which demanded that he recognize the Oder-Neisse line as the permanent border between Germany and Poland. Eventually, he was forced to recognize the border due to Western pressure. During the later parts of his tenure as Chancellor, controversy erupted over the roles that many members of his government had in the Nazi Party government of the 1930s and 1940s, with many of his cabine tmembers being accused of being anti-Semitic and committing war crimes in World War II. In 1962 a scandal erupted over a Der Spiegel memo that revealed weaknesses in the West German Army, and his suppression of the memo by arresting the five editors led to a tarnishing of his reputation. In October 1963 he left office and Ludwig Erhard became the new Chancellor. He died in 1967 at the age of 91, having been known for his friendship with the United States and his making of Germany a nation of NATO. Category:West Germans Category:West German politicians Category:Politicians Category:West German chancellors Category:Prime ministers Category:Germans Category:1876 births Category:1967 deaths Category:Catholics Category:German conservatives Category:Conservatives Category:CDU members Category:Center Party of Germany members